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Greater Jacksonville Agricultural Fair

annual fair and agricultural show in Jacksonville, Florida

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionApr 18, 2026
Entity authorityQ133090883 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Greater Jacksonville Agricultural Fair (GJAF) is an annual 11-day event featuring agricultural shows and educational exhibits, midway rides, concerts, carnival food and games. It is staged at the Jacksonville Fairgrounds in Jacksonville, Florida and has been operated by the non-profit Greater Jacksonville Agricultural Fair Association for seven decades.

Association

The Greater Jacksonville Agricultural Fair Association is a Non-governmental organization, 501(c)3 non-profit educational corporation. It received a state charter in 1957 and is controlled by an unpaid board of directors initially led by Bill Birchfield.

More than 500 volunteers plan, staff and manage the fair each year. Their charter says the mission is agricultural education and the population served is Teachers, children and youth.

History

The first GJAF was held in 1955 at the Gator Bowl with 45,000 visitors in attendance. Then, and in the years since, the goal of GJAF has been to "educate, entertain, and inform the citizens of Jacksonville and the surrounding counties about agriculture, horticulture, science, and the arts". In May 1989, ground was broken on property adjacent to the stadium and the following year, the Fair was held at that new location which would remain home for 35 years. That year, over 700,000 people were entertained, more than the population of Jacksonville at the time.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Greater Jacksonville Agricultural Fair” as annual fair and agricultural show in Jacksonville, Florida. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1957, 1955, 1989—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where Greater, Jacksonville and Agricultural can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as annual fair and agricultural show in Jacksonville, Florida. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q133090883. Authority coordinates are 30.327, -81.642. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1957, 1955 and 1989.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Greater Jacksonville Agricultural Fair”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Greater Jacksonville Agricultural Fair primary sources, Greater Jacksonville Agricultural Fair archive and Greater research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Greater Jacksonville Agricultural Fair” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.